Ecologist Jonathan Levine

Jonathan Levine, assistant professor in ecology, evolution, and marine biology, has recently been awarded a prestigious Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering. The fellowship of $625,000, paid over five years, may be used for any reasonable research expenditure.

Levine was one of 16 fellows selected nationally from 100 candidates by a foundation advisory panel. Candidates must be young faculty members in the first three years of their academic careers. The intent of the fellowship program is to provide support for unusually creative researchers early in their careers.

“Jonathan is a truly remarkable young scientist whose research on the impacts of invasive plant species is on the cutting edge of our ecological understanding,” said Alice Alldredge, chair of his department at UCSB. “This award recognizes both his excellence and the great relevance of his work to society.”

Levine’s work encompasses controls over the success and impacts of exotic plant invasions; species diversity and ecosystem function; mechanisms underlying rare plant persistence; determinants of plant commonness, rarity, and coexistence.

Putting his work into perspective, Levine explains that the invasion of species into new biogeographic regions is a process that has regularly occurred over geologic time. Over the last millennium, however, the human-mediated transport of species across the globe has increased the rate of invasion several orders of magnitude.

Although most invaders fail to establish in their new range, the fraction that succeed have collectively exerted tremendous ecological and economic damage, tens of billions of dollars annually.

Through competition, predation, and the alteration of disturbance regimes, biological invasions have caused massive changes in ecosystem structure, and are second only to habitat destruction in threatening imperiled species in the U.S.